1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multi-scene display system in which a screen or other picture display panel, such as a television set or the like, is divided into a plurality of regions and different pictures are displayed in each of those regions.
2. Background
A technique in which a screen or other type of picture display panel is divided into a plurality of regions to display different pictures on the respective regions of the display at the same time has been proposed, for example, in Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 56-154885. In that case, when a plurality of programs are recorded on a video tape, reduced size scenes are formed and the reduced scenes simultaneously displayed on one display screen. In this way the plural programs stored in the video tape can be easily recognized, the multi-picture display providing an index of the video tape contents.
In producing such reduced scenes, it is conventional, when sampling the normal picture information, to average that information. For example, when a reduced scene of a size which is 1/n of a normal scene is formed, picture data are thinned out by averaging the sampled data so that the reduced scene consists of compressed data representing the entire normal size scene.
In the case where the data are sampled as described above, however, a problem occurs in that the picture resolution deteriorates making the displayed picture rough, which deteriorates the viewing quality of the displayed scene. Furthermore, to perform such average sampling, it is necessary to use a frequency band limiting filter, a memory for storing newly formed compressed picture information, and so on. Accordingly, the structure becomes complicated and expensive.